Thursday, May 2, 2013

The Mystery of the SRALP: "No Physa acuta were found."

If you’re just joining
us. This is the fourth and final
installment in my 2013 series on the Snake River Physa controversy. It won’t make any sense unless you back up
and read February, March and April first.
I’m serious, I mean it, and I’m in no mood to be trifled with, this
month in particular.

Over two years have passed since the Dixie-cup showdown
in Boise, and I will admit that I have been anticipating the formal publication
of the Gates & Kerans report with mixed emotions. On the one hand, I was pleased to see that
the replacement of the Minidoka Dam spillway was approved shortly after our meeting
in September of 2010 [1] and that actual construction got underway in November
of 2011. On the other hand, the “Record
of Decision” published by the USBR after our September meeting contained
language strongly implying that its water management options had been
significantly narrowed by the presence of putatively endangered physids in the
Minidoka tailwaters. And a regular program
to monitor physid populations has been continued through the duration of the
spillway replacement project, to the present day.

So the Gates & Kerans paper was published online in late
December, with old-fashioned paper publication following in February of 2013
[2]. And I was initially encouraged to
see that a substantial volume of fresh sequence data has been added since 2010,
and that the authorship has been expanded to include John Keebaugh, Steven
Kalinowski, and Ninh Vu [3]. But my heart sank when I read these five words:
“No Physa acuta were found.”

As I flipped through the pages of the PDF reprint I
recognized much that was familiar: the heroic 2006-08 survey of the Minidoka
Dam tailwaters yielding 274 small, oddly-shaped physids, the anatomical
observations “courtesy of John B. Burch,” and the mtDNA gene trees with
outgroups fished from GenBank, none sampled closer than Wyoming.

In addition, the authors reported an expansion of their
mtDNA survey to include a very peculiar sample of physids collected hundreds of
miles downstream from the Minidoka Dam (RM 675), all the way across southern Idaho. Here is the single line from their methods
section relevant to this enlarged sampling effort, quoted verbatim: “Museum
dredge samples collected from the Snake River between RK 322 (RM 200) and RK
948 (RM 589) from 1995 to 2003 were re-examined to determine species
distribution.” The authors did not offer
any explanation regarding the gear or methodology used for “dredging,” but one
might infer that samples thus obtained came from deeper water, not from the
shallows.

The (N=19,427!) individual physids in this “museum dredge
sample” were screened for their match to Taylor’s [4] original description of
the P. natricina shell: “small size
(maximum of 4.8 – 6.9 mm shell length, plotted above), ovoid shape, inflated body whorl,
well-impressed suture, broadly rounded anterior end with a wide aperture making
the greatest width anterior to the midlength of the shell, microsculpture of
oblique growth lines, and a series of parallel spiral lines consisting of
curved arcs with their concavity toward the shell aperture.” Through this elaborate winnowing process
passed 52 individuals (collected from RM 559 to RM 368), 15 of which yielded
mtDNA sequence data. All 15 of the new,
downstream mtDNA sequences matched the sequences previously recorded from the
Minidoka tailwaters and referred to Physa
natricina in 2010.

Gates and colleagues concluded, “Our results confirm the
original description of P. natricina
as an endangered species and expand the extant distribution” some 200 river
miles downstream from the range suggested by Taylor, all the way across Idaho into
Hells Canyon on the Oregon border.

And you found no Physa acuta? Did you even consider getting off I-84
anywhere between Twin Falls and Boise, driving five miles south, wading
ankle-deep, bending over and simply picking up any of the plain, ordinary,
crappy, acuta-like Physa that you
have been repeatedly told for five years [5] are as common as cockroaches in
that river? Or did you gin up a
meticulous sampling scheme cynically designed to exclude the 99.7% of the
snails in your sample that might possibly be identified as a Physa acuta?

No Physa acuta were
found? Did you even look on Sunday
morning, 19Sept10, when we visited the Minidoka tailwaters together [6]? Or did three of you literally turn your backs
on me and spend hours sampling a habitat where you knew no Physa acuta (of any standard morphology) could possibly be found,
in an overt and calculated effort not to find them?

No Physa acuta were
found? What did you do with the 30
snails I handed you [7] on Monday morning, 20Sept10, before God, the Bureau of
Reclamation, the US Fish & Wildlife Service, and the choir of malacologists
invisible? Flush them down the toilet?

No Physa acuta were
found? Carve it on the tombstone of
the misbegotten excuse for a science that calls itself “Conservation
Biology.”

Science and politics do not mix. When they have bastard children, science is recessive. Gates, Kerans and their colleagues may have
positioned themselves well to write new proposals, win new grants, train more
students and perpetuate their wretched enterprise in the waters of the Snake
River for years to come. But I am done
with it.

Notes

[1] A nice selection of documents having to do with the Minidoka
Dam Spillway Replacement project, including the Environmental Impact Statement
and the Record of Decision, are available from the USBR website here: [USBR Minidoka page]

[3] I was surprised not to find the name of John B. Burch
among the authors. On 21July09 I was in
the audience for a seminar given by Prof. Burch at the AMS meeting in Ithaca,
where he presented a great deal of background information on P. natricina as the senior author of a
paper with John Keebaugh and Taehwan Lee.
And at the Boise meeting of 20Sept10 he defended the morphological
observations as though they were his own.

[4] Taylor, D. W. (1988) New species of Physa
(Gastropoda: Hygrophila) from the western United States. Malac. Rev. 21: 43-79.

4 comments:

I was anxious to read this last chapter and see the triumph of ecological and genetic sensibilities, culminating in a genetic contrast of the putative endemic with Snake River P. acuta(ish) snails. Alas, there is no closure; just vacuum. Well said Rob: Science is recessive when crossed with politics, and I might add, ingrained expectations. -Thom D (Amy--Montana is lovely this time of year!)

Rob, I am hoping that you aren't really done with it. But even if you are (and I do understand the frustration), this seems like a great opportunity for a student to make a name for him/herself. Make a series of collections of the shallow water Physa, get the sequence data, and test your hypothesis. The best way for a student to make a name is to overturn something that the "establishment" takes to be true. I am optimistic that in time the scientific process will prevail.

Thanks for your kind words. And you make a good point, Andy. Despite local, short-term setbacks such as we've seen with the Snake River Physa, I too continue to have great confidence in the Power of Science. In fact, it seems likely to me that the pace of scientific advance might accelerate if we, the older cast of characters (with our established viewpoints) were to step out of the way!

So this is an advertisement to any of you younger researchers out there looking to make a contribution. The North American freshwater gastropod community could really use some help. And not just in the Snake River.